Ebay My Favourite Charity
This is a fundraising opportunity that Ebay ran in October 2016 and 2017.
2016
Announced by Chris on Funding Group, we followed up with a campaign which resulted in Freegle winning the second award of £3,000 with 6,496 votes.
There was a link at the top of each FD daily digest, 2 different centrally prepared admins, a lot of Facebook and Twitter promotion, both Freegle and Liz (Enfield) paid to boost some Facebook ads, and at the end of the month, there was a mass mailing to members of groups who hadn’t opted out (16 groups had.) There was some discussion as to how much publicity is good and when it becomes too much, and the trade-offs between central and local admins.
Some people felt we could have won the top prize if we had done more. Other ideas put forward included asking members to email all their contacts and asking for a vote rather than a donation in the last days of a competition.
2017
We entered the competition again, aiming for the top award of £7,000. Our action plan is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eHSsSE-Yb9uIZO-L8k3jtDJWPvUG_FixWUUrDoDAw/edit?usp=sharing
Ebay page
http://ebayforcharity.org.uk/favourites/
Member votes
You can see how many of our lovely members have voted for us so far - https://www.ilovefreegle.org/stats/ebay
Users of Freegle groups receive a message with each email generated by FD - "Please vote for Freegle to win up to £7000 of much-needed funding. Save us as your favourite eBay charity - click here."
Plan of Action for Mods for October 2017
On the 13th, 20th and 27th, if you use Facebook, please make a personal appeal to your friends adapted from the text below.
On the 16th, please send both a Special Notice on Yahoo, and an Admin on FD, adapted from the text below.
On the 28th, please send a second Special Notice on Yahoo and an Admin on FD, adapted from the text below.
Do you know any people with large social media followings, or local community groups / Facebook pages? Please ask them to share something from the text below.
Suggested first Admin to be sent out by groups to members:
Subject: Groupname: Freegle needs your help!
Dear Member
We need your help! I'm X, and together with Y and Z we're the volunteers who run this group. You may remember that last year there was a competition on eBay with a top prize of £7,000 for the winning charity. We were thrilled that Freegle won the second prize of £3,000. The good news is that this year eBay are holding the competition again.
Freegle has basic running costs of around £20,000 a year, but no regular income other than member donations, so a prize would be a huge boost to our funds.
Please can we ask all of you who use eBay to mark Freegle as your favourite charity? We are then in with a chance of winning some of the money eBay are offering this year. It costs you no more than a few seconds of your time, just click the link and select ‘save as favourite’ - http://freegle.it/ebay
Thanks so much for your support, we really appreciate it!
X, Y and Z
Suggested second Admin to be sent out by groups to members:
Subject: Groupname: Last chance to vote for Freegle!
Hi again
I'm X, and together with Y and Z we're the volunteers who run this group. You will have seen our earlier message about the eBay competition, in which we're hoping we'll get enough support to win a prize.
Great news, we are doing well with lots of members already having nominated Freegle as their favourite charity. But the competition finishes tonight, so we would really appreciate anyone who hasn't yet nominated Freegle to help us out now. You simply have to click the link and select 'save as favourite' - http://freegle.it/ebay
Thanks to everyone who has voted/nominated us so far and to those that are just about to do it! Fingers crossed for a prize, it will mean so much to us.
X, Y and Z
Twitter and Facebook
There are a lots of Tweets and Facebook posts scheduled nationally to go out for the whole of October.
Suggested basic text for tweets:
"Please support #reuse and vote for Freegle to win a donation from @Ebay4CharityUK Go here >>> http://freegle.it/eBay You just need to save us your #favouritecharity – only takes a minute to do!"
Suggested basic text for Facebook:
Freegle is free to use but not free to run! Support #reuse at no cost to you >>> http://freegle.it/eBay Mark Freegle as your #favouritecharity via eBay for Charity UK and that counts as a vote for us to win a big donation - thank you! (it only takes a minute to do)
Please retweet any you make on your group via https://twitter.com/thisisfreegle
and share the FB posts via https://www.facebook.com/Freegle/ (that can be done via modtools too)
Member votes
You can see how many of our lovely members have voted for us so far - https://www.ilovefreegle.org/stats/ebay
Users of Freegle groups receive a message with each email generated by FD - "Please vote for Freegle to win up to £7000 of much-needed funding. Save us as your favourite eBay charity - click here."
So Far
- 31 Last chance to vote mail to all group volunteers
- 24-29/10 Second bulk mail to members.
- 21-22/10 Another Facebook notification appeal.
- 16/10 Admin messages sent by groups.
- 12/10 Bulk mail to groups asking them to promote to their members (see below).
- 5-9/10 Bulk mail to members asking them to vote.
- 2-3/10 Sent Facebook notifications to freeglers that we can reach via that route asking them to vote.
- 2/10 Done some personal shares on social media to get our friends to vote (have you shared http://freegle.it with a personal appeal on Facebook?)
- 2/10 Sent a mail to all groups asking volunteers to vote.
- 1/10 Put a popup appeal on the site.
- 1/10 Put a note and link in emails we send out.
- 1/10 Scheduled social media throughout October.
12/10 Mail to groups:
You will hopefully have heard that we are trying to win a competition on eBay to get some much needed funding for this coming year. It is running until the end of October and we simply need people to vote Freegle as their eBay favourite charity. We have put further information and suggested wording for admins etc on the wiki at http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/EBay_My_Favourite_Charity_2017
To help with this, we are asking you and your team to do the following please:
- Before the 16th, please send a Special Notice on Yahoo and an Admin on FD. A sample for you to adapt and use is at https://tinyurl.com/y7oyunl5
- If you use Facebook and/or Twitter yourself, please make personal appeals to your friends to go to http://freegle.it/ebay and then Save as Favourite.
There's more planned for later - we'll let you know.
If you know anyone or groups with large social media followings, please ask them to share something from the texts suggested on the wiki or on our national social media pages. The key things to include are the link (http://freegle.it/ebay) and phrase "Save as Favourite".
Last year we got the second prize of £3000, this year we're aiming higher for the first prize of £7000. Please encourage your members to vote for us.
Funding Group
Outcome
2.11.17 - We won the top prize of £7,000!
